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Sunday, October 02, 2016

On Spirit Animals

I don’t pray. Not as a rule, it’s
just something I don’t do.

Every prayer I ever had was beaten out
of by my father’s hands, my mother’s indifference. I’ve been
told that we have to save ourselves, when I bring it up, but it
doesn’t work like that. We save each other: and not a single prayer
to any god makes one bit of difference in that. No god is ever going
to save you: they’re too busy passing around the popcorn and
gloating in our tears. Want to know why there is suffering in the
world? I figure it’s because it’s what give them their power.

Otherwise, if any god was real, they’d
do things now, not just in
dusty books that mean less than nothing. Sorry. I’m just trying to
explain, so that it makes sense. There have been worse parents than
mine. Ones who were never home, or ones kids prayed – having
nothing else to hope for – that they’d never be home. I’ll just
say my day was a mean son of a bitch even before he got a beer in him
and mom was on so many drugs to deal with everything that she did
nothing at all. She was about as empty as you could get and still
walk around calling yourself human. I bet the pharmacist got a crap
ton of pens for all the drugs he put her on.

I was
on a few, because of school. ‘Problem child’ as if that didn’t
mean problem parents. Mom took some of mine, or dad did to sell them.
I never found out who, but I was shaking, strung out. Uncle Tony had
killed himself. He wasn’t a good uncle, I think, but he wasn’t
bad either. In my books then that made him almost a saint. He didn’t
drink, but the doctors said there was something in his brain.
Parasite that made him just walk out into traffic one day and not
stop, something like that out of a bad horror film.

And I
was seeing things. People talk about spirit animals, but it’s more
spirit forms. What’s important
to people, what resonates with them. For dad it was beer, for mom the
pills. I had a cockroach. I knew that because cockroaches are afraid
of people and I never saw it. Never saw anything that could help me.
Sometimes, when I saw them, the spirit animals warned me just before
dad would swing a fist. I learned to read them as well as him. Wasn’t
even sure they were real.

Honestly,
I’m still not. No one had a wolf I ever saw, or a crow. TV
characters, family members: whatever
someones drug is, that was their spirit animal. Could have been me
just projecting, or whatever the term is. The
bad day wasn’t bad, not worse than any other. Maybe that’s what
it was. Words I didn’t escape, a bruise to hide at school.
Sometimes all you try to do is escape when you know you can’t and
it eats at you. Like animals gnawing off their feet in traps.

I felt
like that. I didn’t pray. To this day, I’ll swear I didn’t, but
there was a kid in my room. Between one moment and the next. He was
eleven. I remember that. I think if I ever get Alzheimer’s like a
blessing, I’ll still remember him being eleven.

“Hi.
I’m Jay,” he said, and he grinned. No one ever grinned at me like
that. Not my mom when I was born, not any lover I’ve ever had. No
one has, before or since. It hurt like nothing else too.

I
might have screamed, because he had one hand on my mouth, worried.
For me. He was worried for him, not of anything else. I knew that
too.

“I
didn’t mean to surprise you,” he said. “But you were sad-face
and I thought I could maybe help?”

“My
spirit animal is a cockroach and it hurts.” Of everything I could
have said, could have asked, could have wondered, somehow that fell
out of my mouth. These days, even on bad days like nothing I imagined
as a kid, I’ll remember that moment and have to laugh.

The
boy took it in stride as if it made all the sense in the world.
“That’s not very jaysome,” he said, and – I can’t tell you
what that means. I mean, it’s a word, but it meant – it helped,
is all I’m saying. Somehow the word helped.

He
offered to be my totem, entirely serious, and boasted he would
probably be the best spirit animal ever. I said yes, trying to cover
for my stupid statement, still thinking it so stupid but dad heard
things, came in.

Demanded
to know what another kid was doing in my room, said he wasn’t going
to be having – well, no need to repeat. I try to forget it. The kid
turned, stared up my father. And dad fell back. Fell away, looking
scared. Whatever jaysome was to me, it had other edges I never got to
see.

He
left. Dad left. I’d like to say he never hit me again, or that he
changed, but I’d be lying. The kid looked back at me and let out a
huge sigh. “I’d like to do a helping, but then you’d be changed
and you wouldn’t be you
and that would be really wrong.”

And he
meant it, as he meant everything else I said. So I’ve tried to be
me ever since that day, even if it hurts. I haven’t seen the kid
again. I left home as soon as I could, two years later. I don’t
talk to my parents anymore, though sometimes I don’t think I ever
did. I don’t pray. Never do. But now, some days, I think I
understand a little better the people who do.

Huh? No, I haven’t seen any kind
of spirit animal in years. I figure it was just the withdrawal and
some of the drugs making me loopy, that’s all. It happens. I got
better. I think the kid maybe helped with that too, but I’ll never
know. It’s probably better that way. Definitely safer. Because
whatever Jay was, safe wasn’t part of it at all.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”